On November 28, while appearing on CBS’ Face The Nation, Dr. Fauci once again claimed he is the embodiment of “science” in a feeble attempt to divert attention from his relentless lies and ineptitude concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there's a distinct anti-science flavor to this,” Fauci told host Margaret Brennan, referring to Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) comment that Fauci should be charged with lying to Congress.
In October, Cruz and several other senators presented yet more evidence that Dr. Fauci was well aware that gain-of-function research on coronaviruses was being performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. To bolster their case, the senators produced a letter showing the National Institutes of Health provided grant funding for the extremely dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan at the behest of Fauci.
“If they get up and criticize science, nobody's going to know what they're talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci—people could recognize there’s a person there,” Fauci continued.
“It's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science. That's dangerous,” Fauci said. “To me, that's more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I'm not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever.”
“I'm just going to do my job and I'm going to be saving lives and they're going to be lying,” Fauci added.
It seems as if Fauci is on the defensive, which he should be in view of his complicity in the gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
On multiple occasions, Fauci has appeared before Congress and unequivocally stated that no gain-of-function grants or research occurred on his watch.
However, the more we learn about the origins of the pandemic, the more likely it looks that Fauci played a central role in the manufacturing of COVID-19.
Consider.
For years, Fauci has been an outspoken advocate of gain-of-function research.
In late 2011, Fauci penned an op-ed for The Washington Post in which he wrote the benefits of “engineered viruses” are a “risk worth taking.”
Seven years later, at a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases conference, Fauci celebrated the fact that he was able to circumvent President Obama’s ban on gain-of-function research during the early days of the Trump administration.
Moreover, ample evidence implicates Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, evaded restrictions on gain-of-funding research by outsourcing the perilous experiments to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Even more unbelievable, Fauci and Dazak were fully aware that the Wuhan lab had a less-than-stellar track record of lab leaks and red flags regarding its safety procedures.
In fact, the U.S. State Department sent multiple cables cautioning that risky gain-of-function experiments were being performed in Wuhan as far back as 2017. According to one such cable, State Department officials at the Beijing Embassy warned of “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
Aside from his cheerleading for gain-of-function research, Fauci has also called into question his scientific bona fides when it comes to natural immunity, the usefulness of face masks, the effectiveness of lockdowns, and the efficacy of vaccines.
Over the past two years, Fauci has hemmed and hawed on several “scientific” matters, leading many to believe he is more concerned with covering his own culpability in the outbreak of COVID-19 than presenting science-based assessments.
Yet, considering that Dr. Fauci has been employed at the National Institutes of Health for more than five decades, should we really expect anything else?
Fauci, like so many lifelong bureaucrats before him, is more concerned with protecting his personal fiefdom at NIH than he is concerned with producing sound science.
Dr. Fauci does not represent science. He represents everything that Americans detest about the lying and corruption that runs rampant in the cesspool that has become DC swamp culture.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is senior editor at The Heartland Institute.